Advances in technology have allowed many companies to more effectively manage and track their inventory. Despite these advances, there continues to be a variety of inefficiencies with regard to operations and inventory management. For example, retailers often do not keep track of or count inventory for a particular product because it can be labor intensive and tedious. Instead, retailers, particularly large retailers, simply keep track of the sales for a given product and receive reports of claimed on-hand inventory quantities from an inventory system. The retailers can then use the sales figures for the product and the claimed on-hand inventory quantities as means to indicate when or if a product is not performing well, or as a means to opt to push more of the products onto the retail store shelves.
Such a methodology can be helpful in some respects, however, it does not provide a robust solution to keeping inventory on shelves. For example, the claimed on-hand inventory quantities reported by an inventory system might not reflect the actual inventory quantities. Such a scenario can occur if inventory has been damaged, certain inventory has been tagged as not sellable, inventory has been misplaced or stolen, shipments of inventory are delayed or shipped to the wrong store, or for other reasons. By allowing inventory inaccuracies to perpetuate in an inventory system, it can cause companies to permanently or temporarily lose sales, appear to have poor performing products, lose customers to companies selling competing products, or even have their products replaced at stores with competitors' products. From a retailer's or other interested party's perspective, they might be losing sales simply because they do not have inventory. Accordingly, it is in the best interest of the retailer, supplier, or other interested party to ensure that correct inventory quantities are reflected in inventory systems.